Architectural style: Spanish Colonial Revival. The building is designed to resemble a very large Mexican hacienda.

Historic status: Listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Redevelopment plan: It calls for a complex of high-profile restaurants, gourmet food and specialty shops and entertainment uses, possibly a dinner theater. A total of 20 tenants is expected for the space. A weekly farmers market is also being considered.

Price tag: $40 million.

Previous proposals for the site: Bed-and-breakfast, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, public marketplace.

Revenue to the port: The port would receive a percentage of the rental revenue Terramar gets from its tenants beginning in the 11th year of the lease, estimated to be $20 million over the 40-year lease term. Terramar would pay no rent the first 10 years because of the high construction cost of rehabilitating a historic building.

For more than two decades, the sprawling Spanish colonial complex adjacent to Seaport Village, once populated with inmates and working cops, has been awaiting its makeover. Fanciful ideas, like a Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, bed-and-breakfast inn and public marketplace with artisanal food shops, fish vendors and farm-fresh produce have been bandied about, while the neglected structure languished.

That’s all about to change, says the Carlsbad developer who is racing to meet a November deadline to finance its $40 million vision for transforming the 72-year-old complex into a vibrant downtown destination.

Terramar Retail Centers, which operates Seaport Village and has an option with the San Diego Unified Port District to redevelop the city’s former Police Headquarters building, is lining up high-profile restaurant tenants that it believes will help cement the financing it needs to complete the mixed-use project by as early as late 2012.

While a prolonged recession intruded on its plans just a few years ago to revitalize the historic property, Terramar now believes it is in a position to secure nationally known dining enterprises that in turn will persuade other popular retailers to grab a spot within the nearly 100,000 square feet of leasable space.

According to Senior Vice President Alexander Liftis, Terramar has either signed agreements or is in negotiations for filling more than half of the project.

Key among the prospective tenants is Pizzeria Mozza, a collaboration of celebrity chefs Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali that was an immediate sensation when it opened nearly five years ago in Los Angeles. The restaurateurs have since opened a Mozza in Singapore and this month debuted another of their pizzerias in Newport Beach.

Alex Munoz-Suarez, chief operating officer with the Batali-Bastianich Hospitality Group, which is looking to expand its pizzeria concept worldwide, confirmed that it has tentatively structured a deal with Terramar to locate a 4,200-square-foot Pizzeria Mozza in a two-story space within the downtown San Diego building.

“It’s a beautiful building,” Munoz-Suarez said, noting that the restaurant group will invest $2 million to build out the space. “It looks like an old-style Italian villa. We’re an Italian restaurant group, and it seems to fit who we are,” said Munoz-Suarez. “San Diego is also a market appreciative of good food but probably lacking great pizzerias.”

Proposed restaurants under wraps

Terramar has been unwilling to name any restaurants or retailers it is in negotiations with until it can announce signed commitments all at once. Other restaurant names that have been mentioned by San Diego brokers include Maggiano’s and Eddie V’s, which recently opened in La Jolla. A spokesman for Eddie V’s acknowledged that the restaurant group is looking to expand in San Diego, and the Old Police Headquarters is one of several sites it has explored.

Liftis said Terramar’s strategy has been to initially concentrate on lining up nationally recognizable restaurants, including celebrity-chef-driven concepts, to help anchor the center. The plan, he said, is to fill out the complex with smaller specialty food outlets, such as a bakery, and perhaps cheese, olive oil and chocolate shops, along with regional and national retailers in women’s and men’s fashions, jewelry, accessories and gifts.

An earlier idea to remake at least a part of the Police Headquarters building into a quasi-gourmet food emporium in the vein of the Pike Place Market in Seattle and San Francisco’s enormously popular Ferry Building in San Francisco has been set aside. Instead, the project may regularly host a public farmers market, Liftis said.

Long viewed as an architectural gem reminiscent of the Spanish Colonial-style buildings in Balboa Park, the Police Headquarters building is part of an overall initiative by the Port to reinvigorate the waterfront area around Seaport Village. Toward that end, the Port hopes to break ground in October on the 3.3-acre Ruocco Park at West Harbor Drive and Pacific Highway.

Both projects are also tied to a nascent effort by the Port District to reinvent Seaport Village, a longtime tourist destination, also on Port tidelands, that retail experts agree has grown tired. Leases there are not due to expire until 2018, but Port officials are moving forward now with a public process to rethink both the design and uses within Seaport Village.

Linking up with Seaport Village

Ultimately, the park, the police building, Seaport and the surrounding waterfront area will be designed such that each of the attractions are connected to one another.

“It was a personal mission of mine when I joined the Port to do what I could to get this (Police Headquarters) project finished and Seaport Village modernized and upgraded,” said Port Commission Chairman Scott Peters. “It will really enliven that area, which is a very critical part of the waterfront and is underappreciated and underused by locals. Up to now, people haven’t had the confidence to invest, and now Terramar has found people who believe the conditions are right and optimistic enough to go forward.”

As part of the renovation, a wide-open courtyard around which the complex is oriented will be dressed up with potted plants, palm trees and string lights, and the original fountain will be replicated, Liftis said. The project design also calls for a linear public plaza that parallels the sidewalk along Harbor Drive. The plaza is to include sitting areas, more landscaping and special lighting.

Over the past several years, through the project’s fits and starts, Terramar has invested more than $10 million in marketing, option agreements and preliminary construction work to clean up the interior and remove partitions, jail cell doors and fixtures. Eight jail cells, however, will remain intact for public display.

As tenuous as the economic recovery remains, Liftis says he is confident that the Police Headquarters project can succeed financially.

“This is riskier than the typical project, because restaurants and specialty projects are by their nature risky,” acknowledged Liftis. “They don’t have an anchor tenant that draws people like a supermarket or a Nordstrom that has continuous drawing power, so this project has to stand on its own. But we’re looking at cutting-edge operators who’ve proven their ability to weather the economic cycles.”

Real estate consultant Gary London agrees that the Terramar project carries with it high risk but with that comes the potential for high reward. He noted that the western part of downtown San Diego has matured, with a growing population of affluent residents who, along with conventioneers, tourists and other locals, can help drive traffic to the project.

“It’s hard to know whether people will adequately patronize these restaurants and this project in order for it to be profitable,” said London. “It goes to whether they’ve achieved the right mix and whether the design is enticing. They’re making the calculation that a 2012, 2013 opening will be a match with a much healthier economy.

“I think the police station is a blighted site and absolutely needs to be redeveloped in a sensible way. The developer is now saying, now’s the time.”